It's the whole system. The whole system is rotten to the core. All the individual rotting bits are symptoms of the fact the whole system is rotting.

> I personally would lay far more of the blame at the feet of the slow-but-steady disassembly of a proper tax code which has rendered our Government all but unable to function from a fiscal perspective since the Reagan years.

Federal Receipts as a Percent of GDP:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

There is not any kind of material long-term discontinuity initiated in the Reagan years. It has been approximately flat since the end of WWII, which implies a growth in real government revenue per capita consistent with the growth in real GDP per capita.

This chart is only federal receipts, not state; the total of the two in the US is ~30%. Countries that have taxpayer-funded healthcare systems have a higher total on paper because the cost of the healthcare system is then in the accounting as government revenue rather than private insurance premiums, not because they're doing significantly more non-healthcare government spending. In reality the US government spends more on non-healthcare government expenditures than most other countries because it runs such large deficits.

> Everything I've read on the subject over the years pretty squarely lays it at the austerity movements that have utterly crippled most western countries but none more thoroughly than the United States, where the notion seemingly of spending any public money on anything no matter how needed that isn't Defense spending is Communist

What's really going on here is that the government is already extracting approximately the amount of money from the economy that maximizes medium-term government revenue given the trade off between revenue extraction and GDP growth.

But the government is thoroughly captured by lobbyists, so every dollar the government spends on something that actually benefits the population is a dollar that isn't going to a well-connected government contractor or a union that wants a wasteful boondoggle and can shift enough votes for a representative in a vulnerable district that the party will sell out the general public to secure that seat, or to vote buying from retirees that has now reached the point that US Government spending on retirement benefits consumes more than half of all federal receipts and goes disproportionately to affluent retirees.

Which makes it hard to pass useful programs because you have to fight the incumbents for the money.

> alongside of course the general (and consequential of that) transfer of wealth from the working class to the extremely wealthy who dodge more taxes than ever before, perhaps in all of history of the practice of collecting taxes.

This is also a mischaracterization of the change that happened during the Reagan years.

If you look at nominal tax rates, on paper they went down under Reagan, but then you look at federal receipts and in 1979 they were 17.6% of GDP whereas in 1989 they were... 17.6% of GDP. As opposed to today, where over the last five years it has been in the range of 16% to 18.8%. Or the 1960s and 70s where it was in the range of, well, ~16% to ~18% of GDP. It really hasn't materially changed at all.

What changed under Reagan is that prior to that, tax avoidance was much easier. People were deducting everything. When they lowered the nominal tax rates, they also closed so many loopholes that the effect of the rate reduction on government revenue was zero. Which is to say, the amount of tax dodging is much lower now than it was historically.